Should Teenagers Have Racist Election Tweets In Their Google Results For Life? Jezebel Votes Yes.

Over at the Gawker properties, lady blog Jezebel came up with a creative post-election social media story: Tracie Egan Morrissey decided to make members of the high school set accountable for racist tweets that they sent out after Barack Obama was re-elected. Morrissey writes:

There was an abundance of hate speech on Twitter after Obama's reelection, with people hurling violent and racial epithets. Many of those tweeters were teenagers whose public Twitter accounts feature their real names and advertise their participation in the sports programs at their respective high schools. Calls were placed to the principals and superintendents of those schools to find out how calling the president—or any person of color, for that matter—a "n*****" and a "monkey" jibes with their student conduct code of ethics. We contacted their school's administrators with the hope that, if their educators were made aware of their students' ignorance, perhaps they could teach them about racial sensitivity. Or they could let them know that while the First Amendment protects their freedom of speech, it doesn't protect them from the consequences that might result from expressing their opinions.

Morrissey collected the offensive tweets, along with the names of the students (the majority of whom are assumedly younger than 18), a gleeful accounting of the activities they'd likely list on college applications -- such as their sports teams and pageants -- their schools, the responses from school officials -- the few who responded expressed disapproval -- and the news that in most cases, the student had since deleted their Twitter account.

But that deletion will do them little good. For at least two of the teens, the article, headlined "Racist Teens Forced to Answer for Tweets About the 'Nigger' President," published just four hours ago, is already on the second page of their Google search results. It will surely rise to the first page for all of the teenagers mentioned and will probably haunt them for the rest of their lives, and certainly in the short term. College admissions officers are increasingly researching candidates online after all; these 12 high school students now have a rather nasty addition to their application packages.

The legal system recognizes that young people make mistakes; teens get to shed their youthful indiscretions when their juvenile criminal records are expunged as they enter adulthood. Not so on search engines. Google chairman Eric Schmidt once kiddingly(?) suggested that kids should change their names as adults to get rid of youthful mistakes that get archived on the Internet; as arduous as that seems, at this point, it's one of the few viable solutions.

I asked Google if they (or their future-thinking X Lab) have come up with any better solutions since then. A spokesperson just pointed me to a Google help page about removing content from your search results -- which is only helpful if your social security or credit card number has been exposed by a site. "Think twice before putting personal information online," it reminds users, a little too late for these teens. Alternately, these kids can get down on their little racist knees and beg Jezebel to add a tag to keep search engines from crawling the page and putting it into their search results.

Jezebel certainly could have done the piece without including the teens' full names. But the tone of the piece is such that it's apparent the writer wanted to shame and punish them for broadcasting their ugly, offensive messages. "They surely will have learned the lesson about how their conversations on social media are not private and that their words do, indeed, have an impact," Morrissey writes.

My colleague Jeff Bercovici reached out to Jessica Coen, the editor of Jezebel, for her stance on the post. Her response is that Jezebel's shaming tactic is helping to teach naive young people a lesson -- about racism and about exposing themselves online.

"Even as a minor, you must be eventually held to some grown-up standards regarding the First Amendment, hate speech, and common sense," she replied by email. "And I think there's something larger at play here, and we're going to see this kind of story over and over again until it's innately understood that the line between 'online' and 'in real life' is basically nonexistent. As soon as you are old enough to understand what you're saying -- and high school is definitely past that point -- what you say online matters. That's the way the world works now."

Coincidentally,ReadWriteWeb published a post today about researchers reflecting on the ethics of using social media content in their research, turning unsuspecting Facebookers and Tweeps into guinea pigs. When it comes to kiddies, one researcher suggests that journalists and academics should "talk to the parents and try to get permission for quotes, especially if you are painting the child in a negative light." That certainly didn't happen here, and realistically, given our views toward the public nature of messages that are sent out TO THE WHOLE WORLD ON PUBLIC FORUMS, isn't something kids can rely on.

This is the world you live in, kids. Everything you say in public -- and even private -- forums on the Internet has the potential to go more public and to become a permanent part of your Google footprint. Stupid, offhand remarks at 16 may mean you don't get a job at 26.